How Refreshing Works

When you first connect to Tableau, fresh data is fetched from Jira. After the initial load completes, there is a 5-minute cooldown period before new data can be retrieved. If you click refresh during this window, you'll receive the same cached data and the 5-minute timer will reset.

Why This Exists

Tableau sends hundreds of requests while you arrange and configure your reports. Without this cooldown period, each request would trigger a new fetch from Jira's API, which would cause performance issues and violate Atlassian's Terms of Service.

Getting Fresh Data

To ensure you're receiving the latest updates from Jira:

• Wait at least 5 minutes after your last data load before refreshing
• After 5 minutes, any refresh will fetch the current data from Jira
• You can reuse the same connector daily (or as often as needed) without creating new ones - each refresh after the cooldown period fetches updated data

When you import your Jira data into Tableau, you'll always get an Issues table as your primary table. This table serves as the central table for all analysis and contains all the basic (single-value) fields that you selected.

The Challenge with Multi-Value Fields

Some Jira fields can contain multiple values for a single issue. For example, one issue might belong to multiple sprints, have several linked issues, or contain dozens of comments. Storing these multi-value fields directly in the Issues table would require either:

• Concatenating values into a single text string (e.g., "Sprint 1, Sprint 2, Sprint 3"), which makes analysis nearly impossible
• Creating duplicate rows for each value, which would break the one-issue-per-row structure

Our Solution: Related Tables

To preserve the structure of multi-value fields, we create separate related tables. Each related table has the Issue Key as its foreign key, which links back to the main Issues table. This allows you to maintain proper relationships in Tableau and perform accurate analysis.

For example, if you select these five fields when creating your connector, this is what the Tableau data model will look like:

Fields selected

Resulting data model in Tableau

Which Fields Become Tables

Fields that support multiple values become separate tables in Tableau. For example, Linked Issues, Labels, and Components. The easiest way to identify which fields will become tables is to look for the table icon when creating your connector. Any field marked with the table icon will be exported as a separate table rather than a column in the Issues table.

Special Characters in Field Names

Tableau does not support field names containing the @ or # characters. To prevent errors during import, these characters are automatically replaced with asterisks (*). For example, a custom field named User@Email would appear as User*Email in Tableau.

Special Characters in Table Names

For multi-value fields that become separate tables, table names are sanitized to meet Tableau's naming requirements. All characters except letters, numbers, and round brackets () are replaced with underscores. Additionally, Tableau requires table names to start and end with alphanumeric characters, so if a table name starts or ends with any other character (including round brackets), an underscore will be added. For example, a table named #My-Table! would appear as _My_Table__ in Tableau, and Sales(Q1) would become Sales(Q1)_.

Custom Field Numbering

Jira has two types of fields: system fields (built-in fields like "Priority" and "Status") and custom fields (fields you create). Each custom field has a human-readable name and a unique identifier like customfield_10474.

// System field example
{
  "id": "issuelinks",
  "name": "Linked Issues",
  "custom": false
}

// Custom field example
{
  "id": "customfield_10474",
  "name": "Customer Impact",
  "custom": true
}

When multiple fields share the same name, we append the custom field number to prevent conflicts in Tableau:

• System field vs. Custom field: The system field keeps its clean name, while the custom field gets its number appended. For example, a system "Priority" field and a custom "Priority" field (customfield_10001) appear as Priority and Priority 10001.
• Custom field vs. Custom field: The first custom field keeps the clean name, and all others get their numbers appended. For example, three custom fields named "Score" would appear as Score, Score 10002, and Score 10003.

These same rules apply to multi-value fields that become separate tables. For example, a system "Issue Links" table and a custom "Issue Links" table (customfield_10071) would appear as Issue Links and Issue Links 10071.

Enhanced Field Representations

For improved usability, we enhance certain fields by providing multiple representations in Tableau:

Time in Status fields display data as formatted strings in Jira (e.g., "2d 1h 23m"). To make this more useful for analysis, we provide two versions:

• The original string format (e.g., Time in Status)
• A numeric format in hours (e.g., Time in Status (Hours))

This allows you to display the human-readable format while performing calculations and comparisons using the numeric field.

Unsupported Field Types

A small number of specialized custom field types cannot be included in your Tableau data because Jira does not make this data available through their API. For example, emoji fields in Jira Product Discovery projects cannot be synced to Tableau due to this API limitation.

Tableau Connector for Jira supports both dark and light mode and will automatically apply the theme based on your Jira settings. Dark mode can help reduce eye strain during extended use. To enable dark mode all you need to do is enable it in Jira. Click the settings icon and then select General Settings:

Towards the bottom of the page you'll see a Theme section. Select Dark:

Now go back to the Tableau Connector app and the UI will be in Dark Mode:

Tableau Connector for Jira supports all 26 languages that Jira supports. You can view the complete list of supported languages in Atlassian's documentation. The app automatically displays content in the language selected in your Jira settings. To change your language preference, visit your Atlassian account preferences.

The Tableau Connector app will automatically detect the changes: